Wuthering high: a bard academy novel (12 page)

Samir, in fact, is so taken aback by Blade that he doesn’t even remember to propose (his usual MO when talking to a girl for the first time). Hana notices. And she doesn’t like it. She starts to shifts uncomfortably.

“So what about this ghost?”

“The best campus legend,” Samir starts.

“She’s just a Bard student who disappeared fifteen years ago, presumed dead,” Hana says, sounding irritated. “She used to live in your room.”

I try to wave Hana off, but it’s too late.

“My room? Really? We’ve got a ghost? Miranda, why didn’t you tell me we had a ghost?”

“I don’t think I said ‘ghost,’ ” I say.

“That’s exactly what you —” Samir starts before I kick him under the table. “Ow! What did you do that for?”

The last thing I want is for Blade to be in the Kate Shaw Mystery Society. She’s likely to make us rub paint on our faces and run naked through the woods to try to get in touch with the spiritual world. No thanks. I’ve smelled her incense.

“I thought I picked up on something strange in the room,” Blade says. “I thought it was just you or the vampire, but I guess there might be some spiritual activity. How did she die?”

“We don’t know,” Samir says.

“Well, why don’t we find out?”

“How?”

“Let’s ask her.”

“You can’t really think this will work,” I say to Blade in our room later that night.

She has concocted a Ouija board, using nothing but a piece of poster paper she’s drawn on with permanent marker and a glass she stole from the cafeteria.

Blade, Hana, and Samir are all sitting cross-legged on the floor. Samir has snuck into the room through the window, and if he’s caught we’ll probably all get dish duty.

I watch as Blade lights her skull candle and turns out the lights in the room.

“Is that really necessary?” I ask her.

“We have to set the mood,” she says. “Now, you sit down on the floor, across from Hana. We all have to sit and hold hands.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Samir says.

“Very unlikely,” Hana says. She’s not happy to be sitting here at all. I get the distinct impression that she might like Samir herself. She certainly doesn’t like Blade showing him any attention. “You know this isn’t going to work,” she adds now. She’s even more skeptical than I am.

I sit down and look at the board. Across the top there are all the letters of the alphabet. In the middle there are just three words written: “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.”

“Come on, you naysayers,” Blade says, sitting back down and grabbing Samir’s hand first and then mine. Reluctantly, Hana grabs my hand and then Samir’s.

“Everyone, close your eyes,” Blade tells us.

Then Blade starts to chant some kind of gibberish. I peek and see that Samir has his eyes tightly closed. Hana, however, is looking straight at Blade, skepticism written all over her face. Hana glances over at me and mouths,
Can you believe this?

When Blade has finished her chanting, she instructs us all to put one finger on the top of the glass. Each of us do this, and then she asks the room, “Are there any spirits here?”

At first, nothing happens. The glass is still. Samir doesn’t seem to care because he seems to be looking down Blade’s shirt.

“I don’t think this is working,” Hana says. “Big surprise.”

Blade ignores her. She asks the room again. “Are there any spirits here?”

This time, the glass starts inching forward, ever so slowly from the edge of the paper, toward the middle.

“Samir!” Hana says. “You’re doing that.”

“I’m not! I swear, I’m not,” he says.

The glass moves slowly toward the “yes,” and then stops on top of it.

“Oh, friendly spirit, please spell out your first and last initials for us,” Blade says.

Again, the glass moves. First to the K. And then to the S.

“You have to be moving it,” Hana says to Blade.

Blade, however, ignores her.

“Did something happen to you at Bard Academy?” Blade asks.

The glass, again, moves to “yes.”

The hairs on my arms stand up a little. I look at Samir, and he’s starting to look a little uneasy. I don’t think he’s consciously moving the glass.

But Hana gives me a look that says she thinks it’s all garbage. That Blade is leading us on.

“Do you know the vampire on campus?” Blade asks.

This completely breaks the tension-filled moment. Hana actually laughs. Samir seems a little relieved. I guess he’s not so brave after all. If he had a freshman here, she’d probably be comforting him, not the other way around.

“Vampire? What kind of question is that?” Hana asks. I have to agree.

“She’s obsessed,” I tell Hana and Samir.

“I’m not obsessed. I saw one,” she tells them.

“Enough about vampires, Buffy,” I say. “Let’s get back to Kate, okay? I’m going to ask the next question. Kate, what is the key for?”

“Key? What key?” Blade asks.

The glass starts to move again. It heads to G, then to R, and then to E, E, and N.

“Green? What does that mean?” Hana asks.

“Wait, it’s still moving,” Samir says.

The next letters it lands on are H, O, U, S, and E.

“Green house? What green house? There aren’t any green houses around here.”

“No, wait,” says Samir. “I think she means the greenhouse. You know, the one on the far north side of campus. With the flowers.”

The glass starts to move again. It lands on the word “yes.”

“See? Told you,” Samir says.

“I think this is all a hoax,” Hana says. “I think Blade has rigged this whole thing.”

“Fine, I’ll take my hand off entirely,” Blade says, and she lifts off her finger, leaving just Samir, Hana, and me with our fingers on the glass.

“Kate — one last question,” I say. “What are you trying to tell me about the teachers in the yearbooks? Are they the Brontë sisters?”

I watch as the glass slides back to “yes.”

“Did the Brontë sisters fake their deaths?”

This time, however, the glass moves to “no.”

“You can’t say I did that this time,” Blade says to Hana.

“What are you trying to tell me?” I ask, less to the room and more to myself. The glass moves again across the poster board, scraping the paper a little as it goes. It spells:

T H E Y
A R E
D E A D

I get goose bumps on my arms.

“Stop it, Samir,” Hana says, her voice a little panicked. She’s a little bit uneasy now.

“I told you, I’m not doing it,” Samir says, and then he pulls his finger away.

The glass, however, keeps moving.

It spells:

D E A D
D E

And then Hana pulls her finger away. “Okay, this isn’t funny anymore,” she says. I’m a bit freaked out myself and I pull my finger off, too.

But, as the four of us watch, the glass doesn’t stop moving. It keeps spelling out the word. Then suddenly some force takes the glass and whips it off the board and across the room, breaking it into a dozen pieces against the wall.

That’s when the lights in the room come on and we see Ms. W standing at the door.

“You four have some explaining to do,” she says sternly. “And you’ll be doing it in the headmaster’s office.”

Fifteen

Guardians escort the
four of us to Headmaster B’s office.

The Guardians don’t speak to us, but just stare blankly ahead. There are four of them, as well, and they’re wearing the Bard Guardian uniform, which is strikingly similar to the uniform worn by mall security. It’s navy blue, and they’ve got baseball caps with the Bard crest on them.

By now, the campus is dark and the streetlamps are on, casting an eerie glow over everything.

I consider trying to run for it, but I know that the Guardians are quicker than they look. This morning I saw one tackle a kid who was trying to make off with a serving spoon from the dining room. I don’t know what he was going to do with it, and probably the Guardians didn’t, either, but he didn’t make it very far before he was splayed on the ground with his hands behind his back. Blade looks resolute, Samir looks scared, and Hana looks annoyed.

The Guardians take us inside the office, where there’s a fireplace and a giant mahogany desk, but no Headmaster B. We’re told to sit in the four chairs facing Headmaster B’s desk, as if she’d been expecting us already.

The Guardians draw back to the door of the room.

“This is all your fault,” Hana whispers to Blade.

“No, this is
your
fault. Your skepticism angered that spirit,” Blade says.

“There’s no rule against séances, but there is one against having a boy in your room; ergo, ladies, it’s my fault for sneaking into the room in the first place,” Samir says, gallantly trying to take the blame.

“Shut up,” both Blade and Hana say at the same time. Samir obliges.

A cold draft suddenly seeps into the room and I shiver.

“Miranda from
The Tempest,
” Headmaster B says behind me, causing me to whip around. She is stealth. “I am very sorry to see you in my office so soon.” Headmaster B takes a seat behind her desk as if nothing is amiss. She’s so tiny that she looks a little like she’s a child playing in her father’s study.

She looks at each of us in turn.

“Now, Miranda, I understand that you and your friends have taken an acute interest in the disappearance of Kate Shaw. And that you were…” Headmaster B pauses and looks up as if trying to find the right word, “…trying to summon her with a séance. Is this right?”

Of course, when she says it, it sounds ridiculous.

“Yes,” I say.

“And, were you successful in communicating with Kate Shaw?”

I’m thrown a bit by that question.

“Um, I think so, although we weren’t sure.”

“And what did she tell you?”

Again, I’m a bit surprised. Why is she showing such an interest in the séance? Shouldn’t she be lecturing us on how we’re being superstitious and unscientific, and it goes against the grain of academic excellence at a place like Bard? Instead, she seems to be taking the séance thing very seriously.

“She didn’t tell us anything,” Hana says, suddenly. “She told us the Brontë sisters were dead. Big deal. Everybody knows that.”

I glance over at Hana. I’m not even sure that’s what the ghost was trying to say. Or even if it was Kate we were talking to.

“I see,” Headmaster B says, looking down at her hands, then folding them together on her desk. “Anything else?”

“She told us something happened to her here,” Blade volunteers.

“You did that,” Hana snipes. “It wasn’t any ghost. And for all we know, you were the one who told us the Brontë sisters were dead, too.”

“How could I? I wasn’t even touching the glass then,” Blade shouts.

“Children!” shouts Headmaster B. “Enough.”

Everyone falls silent again. She considers us all in turn, as if trying to decide what to say to us.

“I strongly suggest that each one of you take a hard look at your behavior tonight and see where it has gotten you. The four of you need to concentrate on your studies, and not on some ghost story. Kate Shaw was a tragedy for Bard, but we have all moved on.” Headmaster B looks at me.

“On the first day of your arrival, I told you that there would be no wasted time at Bard,” she says. “Remember the inscription in the Bard chapel? ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me’? Well, if you have the kind of extra time to perform frivolous séance parties, it appears to me that you have ample time to accomplish something far more rewarding.”

“What are you talking about?” Blade asks her.

I already know what she’s talking about.

“Chores, my dear. I am talking about chores.”

Dish duty is even more disgusting than I could have imagined and I have a very active imagination. There is something really revolting about half-eaten food, and the fact is most of the plates are far from clean. The food is terrible and it looks even worse half-eaten. I’m put at the rinser station, where I’m supposed to rinse off the dishes with a spray nozzle of superhot water. I’ve got on rubber gloves, but they do little good. I wash dishes for a solid hour and my hands feel red and raw and blistery.

Okay, Mom and Dad. I’ve learned my lesson, okay? My room is haunted by a temperamental ghost. I’m being stalked by a guy who thinks he’s Heathcliff from
Wuthering Heights
. And now I am elbow-deep in the most disgusting, gray, food-blob–filled, rank water ever.

I
get
it. I’ve done some bad things, and this is karmic payback. And I am really,
truly,
absolutely sorry.

“Whose idea was it to have that séance?” Samir asks as he scrapes off some unknown food particles from a pan in the sink next to mine.

“Your girlfriend’s, as I recall,” Hana says.

“I’m not his girlfriend,” barks Blade, who is towel drying dishes and putting them into the large carts where they’re stored.

“Quiet over there!” a Guardian barks at us.

If I ever get home, I think, I’m never going to complain about doing dishes again. Dishes at home = loading dishwasher, and it takes ten minutes. Dishwashing here = scalding-hot water, weird, smelly grayish water with food floating in it, hands so wrinkled they’re like prunes, and it takes hours. I am going to vomit.

It is true that I’ve led a spoiled life. I realize that now. I do. Please. Someone save me.

God doesn’t answer my prayer. But he does send me Ryan Kent.

He steps up and puts his tray on the conveyer belt near my rinse station.

I pray that my hair isn’t quite flattened to my head with sweat, which is what it feels like. The scalding-hot water has melted all my makeup, I’m sure, and has given my hair the frizz of a Brillo pad.

“Ms. Fashion Police,” he says, a look of incredulity on his face. “I can’t believe you’re on dish duty! What on earth did you do?”

Do I tell him the truth? Yeah, my room is haunted and my crazy Wiccan witch roommate convinced me to do a séance with a Ouija board to try to commune with the dead. You know, because we’re insane, hard-core occult nerds. Oh, and by the way, please take my virginity?